by Clint Willis
The climbers fell asleep. Hours passed. The sun dipped lower in the sky. The early afternoon light in the woods didn’t fade; it gave way to something thicker: a coverlet drawn across the climbers’ sleeping bodies.
Peter awoke to a sense of peace and a conviction that this last sleep was a gift from Kangchenjunga. He was grateful. He wished only that he could remember what he’d known upon waking; already it was gone.
20
JOE TASKER HAD opened a climbing shop in the Peak District, in Derbyshire. The four Kangchenjunga climbers met there in the summer of 1979 to sort through photographs from the trip. Georges and Doug were making preparations for another attempt on Nuptse, where Joe and Doug had failed the previous year. Peter returned to his climbing school in Leysin. He guided clients through the summer and made plans for his next expedition, a four-man attempt on Gauri Sankar (7,134 meters; 23,405 feet), which lay on the border of Tibet and Nepal.
Peter as a boy had attended a Don Whillans lecture. He remembered Whillan’s description of a 1964 expedition to Gauri Sankar, which Whillans had made the year after he’d climbed the Central Tower of Paine with Bonington. The trip had featured a nightmare approach through leech-infested jungles patrolled by roving bandits, as well as extremely difficult climbing in very cold weather. Whillans and Ian Clough had made two attempts on the summit. They had narrowly missed being killed by collapsing ice towers during the first attempt and had almost died in an avalanche during their second retreat.
Climbers had at last reached Gauri Sankar’s summit while Peter and his companions had been on Kangchenjunga. Still, the mountain remained an enticing target—a huge complex of vertical rock, avalanche-swept gullies and sharply defined ridges. Peter had his eye on the unclimbed West Ridge.
He was to serve as expedition leader. None of his three companions had been to the Himalayas. Tim Leach, an architecture student, was seven years younger than Peter. He was a very strong rock climber and passionately committed to alpine-style climbing. Guy Niethardt made his living as a climbing guide in his native Switzerland. He’d climbed with Dougal Haston and had spent many a night at the Club Vagabond, where he’d polished his English and even picked up a North Country accent. The fourth climber was John Barry—the same John Barry who had been with Bonington and Whillans and the rest in Patagonia sixteen years before.
The Gauri Sankar expedition was scheduled to leave Europe in mid-September. Peter finished his guiding and said good-bye to Hilary in Leysin and flew to England for final preparations. He felt increasingly disoriented by events. His book about Changabang—The Shining Mountain—had won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize for young British authors; meanwhile, his father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Peter spent the last days before his departure packing and visiting his parents, including a final afternoon picking apples in their suburban yard near Manchester. He carried away a vision of the two of them waving good-bye to him from the front door; he studied the image and stored it carefully away like some artifact. He was on his plane on the runway at Heathrow before he allowed himself to acknowledge that his father might die while he was gone.
The climbers spent a week in Kathmandu—arranging for porters, signing insurance contracts and lining up permits. The ten-day walk to the mountain took them past terraced fields and villages. They encountered a couple with a badly burned child; they gave the couple money and urged them to take the boy to a hospital. The hospital was three days’ walk away. The climbers didn’t think the boy would survive.
They woke the next morning to a view of their peak and their chosen route, the mountain’s West Ridge. It was a long, meandering line with huge notches that promised difficulties. They climbed up through jungles that—as Whillans had testified—swarmed with leeches. Peter would peel off his wet socks to find a dozen or more of the creatures busily draining the blood from each foot.
The climbers entered a remote hanging valley rarely traveled by westerners. They came to Lamobagar, a village of some 250 souls, half of them Tibetan refugees. The Tibetans lived well apart from the main village, in a collection of stone huts around a temple—a gompa. Peter and John followed the sound of drumming to the Tibetan settlement that evening. They came upon a group of twenty or so girls engaged in an oddly rough dance. The girls giggled as they careened around the small courtyard in front of the temple. A bearded lama waved the two Englishmen into the front room of the gompa, where a group of fifteen or so men sat drinking the local chang—a powerful brew made from barley. Peter and John drank with them. A sad young man with big teeth asked the two visitors for film and cigarettes, and for an umbrella. It was raining hard when the Englishmen left the temple to search for their tents in the dark.
The next morning they returned to the gompa with the other members of the expedition. A lama blessed them and told them to be prudent; he also urged them to make their Base Camp a holy place—to refrain from killing animals there. The climbers left the village, passing another lama who shuffled up to them muttering phrases they could not decipher. They gave him money and continued on their way, turning up the Rongshar Gorge.
Peter looked back once and saw an old man standing with his hand resting on the shoulder of a boy. The man shivered in the morning cold as he watched the foreigners enter the valley; it had served as a path for his ancestors during their trek into Nepal from the eastern regions of Tibet. The stories said that those ancestors had seen their new home in a dream and had come here to seek it.
The British and their porters climbed muddy paths along cliffs that rose above the river. They came to a valley Peter knew to be the birthplace of Jetsun Milarepa, the eleventh-century Tibetan poet and saint. They passed a spot where porters had abandoned Whillans and his fellow climbers in 1964; the porters had fled after an encounter with armed bands of Tibetan robbers. The path to the mountain now followed the Chumalagu Chut, a tributary of the Rongshar. The members of the 1964 expedition had dabbed red paint on the trees to mark their path. Some of the marks were still visible.
Peter and his companions camped in the jungle on the night of October 7. They peered up past shafts of bamboo to a sky speckled with stars. They crossed a river the next morning and climbed into open country, catching further glimpses of their mountain. It seemed to Peter that this was a truly wild place, better suited to wolves than to men.
The expedition reached 16,000 feet amid swirls of falling snow. This was the site they had chosen for Base Camp. The quality of sounds changed as they made their camp. Peter felt as if he had been swimming out to sea against the tide and now the tide had shifted; it carried him away from shore and into a fog that hid the world.
The climbers had gained almost 9,000 feet of altitude during the final three days of their trek. Tim Leach, the youngest of the party, was feeling the change in altitude more than the others. He stayed behind while they set out to approach the mountain, still hidden by a subsidiary ridge. Snow fell and low clouds made it impossible to pick out a route to the top of this ridge. They turned back without seeing their mountain, but caught a sort of glimpse of it that night. The clouds disappeared after sunset and the mountain’s huge double-peaked form blocked the stars, creating a silhouette that stared down at them like an empty mask.
The three fit climbers had a real look at the mountain on October 11. They carried loads to the site of their Advance Base Camp, at the start of the West Ridge, which rose overhead to carry on for two miles and more of rock steps and ice arêtes. The crest of the ridge looked frighteningly narrow and exposed; it fell away sharply on both sides.
The climbers and porters spent several days hauling loads to the new camp. Tim wasn’t able to help; he was still suffering from the altitude. His condition grew abruptly worse on the evening of October 15; he became incoherent and his vision began to deteriorate. Peter and the other climbers helped him down to a lower camp the next day. They were vastly relieved when the thicker air revived him.
The climbers returned to their task, at last coming to grips
with the ridge itself—a mix of loose rock, poorly consolidated snow and friable ice, with huge cornices overhanging the void on both sides. Tim recovered after a few days, and was able to join the others on the ridge, but the dangerous conditions forced the climbers to proceed slowly.
They had been on the mountain almost a month when a gust of wind blew John Barry from a belay stance. He fell 200 feet, colliding with snow and rocks, convinced that the rope would snap when he came to the end of it. He was surprised when he stopped falling. He hung bewildered for a time and then found his jumar and climbed the rope, ignoring the pain in his limbs and the blood that welled from his hatless scalp. He had wrenched his knee and perhaps broken his wrist and had suffered a mild concussion. He was soon lucid again, but he was too sore and shaken either to climb or to descend the ridge alone.
John’s injury meant the expedition was once again down to three active climbers. They left John with Pemba, a high– altitude porter, at their high camp and set out to explore the upper reaches of the ridge. Peter led up a rock tower and over it and onto snow. The nature of the ridge—the steep snow falling off to either side, the huge cornices that overhung so much space, the blurred glacier far below—distorted his spatial awareness. His fatigue and a sudden manic joy compounded his confusion. The view seemed to veer toward him like a flying creature; its wing brushed his face and the creature carried on past and then circled back into the country that lay ahead of him. He might have been in space, in the desert, at sea. He was far from the familiar and yet he felt strangely at ease.
The three men climbed a 1,500-foot step in the ridge and arrived at a flat section that was like crossing an ancient bridge. Cornices overhung both sides of the ridge and the snow at the crest was deep and unstable. A step collapsed beneath Peter. He looked down against his better judgment and saw through the snow to Tibet. He could imagine the entire edifice collapsing and taking him with it. He imagined himself caught in tons of falling snow, an animal caught in a flood or a forest fire. He moved quickly and with great care, a barefoot thief crossing a room. He wished not for safety but only for this awful fear to leave him. He reached rock and clung to it with almost no relief but rather with a rising sense of desperation.
Tim and Guy followed him. Peter said something and turned back, leaving them to continue up the ridge. He moved down in a world of mist; if he fell he would disappear into it. He descended to the high camp where John and Pemba waited.
Tim and Guy arrived later. They had climbed two more pitches. They had soloed a section of the ridge on the way down; the wind had blown a fixed rope out of reach. A step had given way under Tim and he had nearly fallen; here the mishap seemed hardly worth mentioning.
John Barry started out with the others the next morning, but his injured hand was useless. The final sections of the ridge would be too difficult for him. He turned back. The remaining three climbers and Pemba reached the previous day’s high point and continued. They fixed more rope; the ridge became still more exposed as the West Face of the peak fell away. Peter at one point sat straddling the ridge, bemused and again disoriented. The Tibetan sunshine bathed his left side; the wind and snow of Nepal came at him from his right. He felt himself part of an abstraction, a painting or quilt.
Peter and his three companions descended to their high camp late in the day. They would leave for the summit in the morning. Tim and Peter were away first, Guy and Pemba followed them. Tim came to the section he’d soloed two days before; the rope was still out of reach and he climbed the pitch with no protection. Peter started to follow but he stopped; he was certain that he would die if he tried to cross without the security of a rope. He shouted for Tim, who cursed and retraced his steps to put Peter on belay.
Tim led three pitches of mixed rock and ice, placing no protection between his anchors. Guy took over for a time, making a very difficult and exposed traverse. Peter took his turn at the lead, kicking his crampon points into frozen snow. It was dark when he finished the pitch. The ridge was behind him. He was standing at the edge of the plateau that supported the mountain’s South Summit—the lower of the peak’s two summits, and still unclimbed.
There was no question of trying to reach either summit tonight. The party dug holes on a shelf just below the plateau—three holes for four climbers—and lay in them as if in canoes. They had run out of food and that made the cold harder to endure. Peter had one of the trenches to himself but he rose in the night and joined Guy; it was warmer that way.
They rose at dawn and set out across a vast white field. They walked on low-angle snow, roped together, into a world both new and impossibly old. No person had seen this. Pemba threw a few grains of ceremonial rice into the air. Peter smelled jasmine. There was a buzzing in his head as if some circuit had given way; something in his mind would not accept this vast stillness. An odd feeling arose in him. He imagined icy water in an empty room, enough to cover the floor and rise to the open windows.
The South Summit was there at the top of a wide gentle slope. The four climbers approached it together and stood shyly just below it, uncertain of their rights. They had promised not to stand upon the very top. The sky was clear and they felt themselves surrounded by a vast and empty sea, as if the mountains were not mountains but rather frozen waves of stillness.
The climbers looked across to the North Summit. There was no question of trying to reach it. They would not have the strength to return. They stayed on their summit for fifteen minutes. The wind drove them off; this wind and the luminous, ghost-blue horizon put Peter in mind of some unending winter.
They climbed back down to the West Ridge in the gathering dark. They took almost five hours to retrace their route to the high camp, where John was waiting with soup.
The next morning they began the climb down the rest of the ridge. They moved together between steeper sections that required rappels. Peter and Guy tied on with John. Tim and Pemba made a second rope. The five men’s concentration flickered and faded with their strength.
They spent another night on the ridge, and made their way down to Advance Base Camp in the morning. They stopped there long enough to drink tea and eat baked beans and Spam. They carried on, dragging their legs through the soft afternoon snow. Tim outpaced the others. His three companions paused above Base Camp to look down upon the tents and prayer flags in the fading light.
They left the mountain on November 15. The river had dropped. The leeches didn’t trouble them. They spent a night at Pikhutu, where they had encountered the couple with the burned child. The same family had passed through the village earlier in the day on their way home. The child had survived.
Hilary’s most recent letter to Peter had warned that his father’s condition was now far worse. Peter considered this on his flight back to England. The approach of the death of his father seemed oddly parallel to this journey of his own, flying across mountains toward the place where the dying man waited. He looked down and considered the view: an arc of endless mountains. He had made six visits to the Himalayas in seven years. His explorations had begun to teach him the shape of the range. He was twenty-nine years old. He meant to spend his life filling in the spaces between the mountains he’d already seen. It was comforting to look down and see that there were enough mountains to occupy him for many lifetimes. He sat back in his seat and ate an orange, a parting gift from one of the Sherpas.
Peter returned to a rainy England. He drove each night with his mother to the Manchester hospital where his father lay dying. The older man’s eyes were sad but he would smile at Peter as if to reassure him. Peter steadied himself by thinking of mountains he knew. One night he showed his father a color poster of Kangchenjunga. His father stared at it, said it was lovely . . . beautiful.
Peter’s father died the next day. He had written in a last letter that he had been amazed by the kindness of his family and his friends. Peter reminded himself that his father’s death was one of countless deaths. The notion calmed him. He saw again in his mind’s eye the mou
ntains in their endless ranks. His ambition receded. He had at times created a version of the mountains in his mind but they outstripped his invention. They did not belong to him; he belonged to them—he was bespoken.
HE WAS GOING back to K2. Joe Tasker was going too. Joe had stayed home during the fall of 1979 to work at his climbing shop. He also had begun preparations for a return to the mountain that had killed Nick Estcourt the previous year. Doug Scott was coming. They’d asked Dick Renshaw—Joe’s partner on Dunagiri in 1975—and he had agreed to join them.
The Dunagiri climb had helped prove that two climbers could get up a hard Himalayan route alone. Joe and Peter had upped the ante on Changabang’s even more difficult West Face the following year. The Kangchenjunga climb in 1979 had proven that a small team could succeed on a difficult route at extreme altitude. This second expedition to K2 would take the next step: the four climbers would attempt an even higher mountain by an even more demanding route. They planned to attempt K2’s West Ridge again, but this time with a team half as big as the one Chris Bonington had assembled for the task in 1978. They would take a different approach to the ridge, avoiding the slope that had avalanched Doug and Nick.
The expedition was set to leave England on April 30, 1980. Doug and Georges and their team were off climbing Nuptse’s North Buttress. Peter was back in Switzerland after his adventures on Gauri Sankar’s West Ridge. They had left Joe to raise most of the money for K2. He’d come up with 12,000 pounds, much of it from two companies: a brewer that hoped to sell nonalcoholic beer to Pakistanis, and a firm that had recently designed a freezer called the K2.